Dr. C.’s Learning Web

about blogging in my classes. What is my method? How do I communicate to students the reasons for blogging, and how do I get them to commit to the exploratory spirit of the endeavor in a school context that emphasizes frequent incremental assessments of items on a task-list?
As I talked to Jim, I realized that I do have a method, or methods, but in the spirit of those methods I’ve resisted writing much about them here. In my experience, the paradox of real school is that it’s extraordinarily powerful when it happens, and at the same time very fragile along the way.  (Robert Frost on poetry: “The figure is the same as for love.”) As I try to get to the magic and guard the fragility, I try not to talk about either too much or too analytically. That said, and at the risk of talking both too much and [...]

Original post by Gardo

Courtesy of the University of Mary Washington Computer Science Department, I and an SRO crowd of students, faculty, and staff got to hear a fascinating talk today by Dr. Eric Miller (CSAIL, MIT). There’s no questioning the depth, intelligence, or intensity of his commitment to a data web; he made the best and most inclusive case for the semantic web I’ve yet heard. Inclusive, because his vision is not just about normalizing descriptive vocabularies or getting everyone firmly in the RDF camp. As I understand it, his vision is more about taking the data already implicit on the web and making it explicit, reusable, mashup-able. It’s a persuasive vision, one strongly reminiscent of Vannevar Bush’s and Douglas Engelbart’s desire to find a way to get ahead of our own information-generation and make good, timely use of the knowledge we have already discovered, knowledge that often languishes unread and unremarked because [...]

Original post by Gardo